The 1984 Olympics were held in Los Angeles. The Soviet Union boycotted the games that year.
Christian anti-gay protestors in San Francisco in 2006. Wider acceptance of gay rights has been a recent phenomenon in the United States.
Aleksei Khomiakov, leading Slavophile thinker
President Obama appointed Billie Jean King as one of two official U.S. representatives to attend the Sochi Olympics. The President did not attend the games.
Boris Nemtsov has highlighted the amount of money spent to host the Olympic games and claims that much of it has been embezzled.
Boris Yeltsin, here shown in 1993, helped to decriminalize homosexuality in Russia.
In this picture from 2008, the pro-Moscow Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov meets with President Vladimir Putin.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak publicly linked homosexuality and pedophilia just prior to the Olympics.
Security issues became a major concern prior to and during the Sochi Olympics. The Islamic militant Doku Umarov has called for mujahedin to attack the Sochi Olympics.
Ivan Kireevskii, the most important figure of the Slavophiles, argued that Russia had been fortunate to escape falling under the rule or influence of the Roman Empire. As a result, he argued, Russia was not contaminated by Roman ideas of rationality and individualism.
Politics have always been a part of the Olympics. Here, Jesse Owens stands defiant on the podium at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi-era Berlin.
Lenin helped decriminalize homosexuality entirely after the Bolshevik revolution.
The Mattachine Society was an early gay-rights organization in the United States, founded in 1950.
Homosexual acts were still technically illegal in Salt Lake City during the 2002 Olympic games.
Pavel Astakhov (politician, TV personality, and Children's Rights Commissioner for the President of the Russian Federation) has justified the restriction on international adoption in part by pointing to Russia’s demographic problems.
In this uplifting image, pro-LGBT activists conducted a "rainbow flash mob" action in Saint Petersburg on the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia in 2009.
Pro-LGBT activists painted a street crosswalk in front of the Russian Embassy in Helsinki, Finland. Protests of a similar type have also occurred in Sweden.
Security became a central concern in the run-up to the Sochi Olympics. This is the site of the December 29, 2013, railway suicide bombing in Volgograd, roughly 600 miles northeast of Sochi.
A second suicide bombing occurred on December 30, 2013, in Volgograd. In the second attack, the bomber destroyed a trolleybus, killing 16 people and injuring 41.
The opening ceremony at the Sochi Olympics, 2014
